Tag: interviews

By now, most of us have heard the story of the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram in mid-April. As outrage and demands for action have spread across the globe, Malala Yousafzai, advocate for girls’ education and author of our 2014-15 Go Big Read book, sat down with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour for an interview.

“I thought that ‘my sisters are in prison now,'” Malala says, explaining her first thoughts on hearing about the abduction. “And I felt as if I should speak up for them, because I have a responsibility. I believe that we are sent to this earth as a community, and it’s our responsibility to take care of each other. The girls in Nigeria are my sisters, and it’s my responsibility that I speak up for my sisters.”

She added that Boko Haram “don’t really understand Islam…they are actually abusing the name of Islam, because they have forgotten that the word ‘Islam’ means peace. […] They are actually afraid of the power of women. They don’t want women to get empowered, to get education, and they don’t want women to achieve their goals. So I think these terrorists are afraid of women, and that’s why they are kidnapping women.”

In case you haven’t gotten enough Ruth Ozeki yet, check out this awesome interview with our Go Big Read author! Goodreads readers submitted questions about A Tale for the Time Being, and Ruth Ozeki sat down with the interviewers to chat about the book, her writing process, her concepts of reality and fiction, self, creativity and everything in between. Below, a few quotations worth thinking about:

My
feeling is that as a person, as a storyteller, I want to be very
careful with the kinds of things I put into the world. I want to make
sure that I am writing from a place of integrity, whatever that might
mean. For me, it means that I am writing in the most honest way I know.
And that doesn’t mean telling the truth.

My
books grow out of my preoccupations. So I am a being in time, and
things are happening in the world around me, and I read about them or
experience them and react to them. I become interested, I start to
investigate, I ponder them. In a way, the writing of a novel is less
about telling a specific story and more about allowing a process of
inquiry to shape what happens on the page. These events will happen in
the world, they’ll enter my mind, I’ll start to think about them, and
the juxtapositions will somehow start to generate story. At that point
my job is just to follow that.

My
books grow out of my preoccupations. So I am a being in time, and
things are happening in the world around me, and I read about them or
experience them and react to them. I become interested, I start to
investigate, I ponder them. In a way, the writing of a novel is less
about telling a specific story and more about allowing a process of
inquiry to shape what happens on the page. These events will happen in
the world, they’ll enter my mind, I’ll start to think about them, and
the juxtapositions will somehow start to generate story. At that point
my job is just to follow that.

Haven’t yet gotten a chance to start this year’s Go Big Read book, A Tale for the Time Being? Or read it already, and want to learn more about the thought process behind the book? Author Ruth Ozeki recently sat down with Ryan Van Winkle, host of the “Book Talk” podcast, to talk about the book and how it got written. It’s a great interview; Ozeki is candid about writing, about inspiration, about the reader-writer relationship, and about all of the strange things that go into the creation of a story.

Author Ruth Ozeki

Whether you’ve already blazed through A Tale for the Time Being or need to have your appetite whetted, spend the afternoon with Ruth Ozeki!

The interview runs approximately 40 minutes, and you can listen to it for free here.

If you haven’t yet gotten your hands on a copy of A Tale for the Time Being, check out our website for information on how to access the book.